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GREENSBORO - The strongest of the 200 recommendations a consultant delivered to the city and the police department Monday was to change the "seriously flawed" promotion process - now.

"No promotions should be made until you have a new system," consultant Carroll Buracker of Harrisonburg, Va., said in an interview about the report Tuesday. "We think that's the most important one to address now."

The police department responded immediately, putting on hold promotions planned for next week.

"There's a strong possibility we'll make some changes," police Chief Tim Bellamy said Tuesday night.

Buracker, who was hired by the city to conduct a four-month, top-to-bottom review of the police department, called the promotion process "mystifying," and said it "unintentionally generates perceptions of favoritism, racial preferences and gender preferences."

Bellamy defended the process and the promotions.

"We've tried to be very cognizant of making the right selections for positions based on the needs of the police department," he said. "Myself and all the chiefs before me have made fair and equitable promotions."

Bellamy said the subjectivity of the department's promotions allows commanders to become better acquainted with promotion candidates through the selection process.

However, the consultant's report said it's unclear how or why someone becomes a corporal, and corporals supervise other officers without going through any testing to prove they are capable of supervising others.

Buracker recommended abolishing the rank or creating a formal promotion process.

For promotion to sergeant and lieutenant, the problem appears worse: Buracker said he was told that each captain submits three candidates from a list of officers who have passed a written test and participated in an oral test. But Buracker found no discernible process for the selection of those names, and said captains would negotiate trades to gain support for their preferred candidates.

"Trading people's names across the board, that has to stop," Buracker said.

Bellamy said that when he became chief, he took steps to improve the process by including captains, which allowed more people to see and affect a candidate's promotion.

"From the reaction I got from captains and assistant chiefs, they all thought it was a good process," Bellamy said.

But the president of the Greensboro Police Officers Association said Bellamy's process didn't improve enough.

"The Greensboro Police Department doesn't rank candidates. It's just a list of alphabetical names," Wendy Raines said in an interview Tuesday. "If there are 70 people, you could be picking No. 70 every time, and nobody would ever know it."

In November, Raines submitted a proposal for a revamped promotion process based on other North Carolina police departments as well as the New York and Los Angeles departments.

"Nobody did it like we did," she said.

In Greensboro, the main complaint that Raines said she hears from members of the police officers association is that they don't know how to structure their careers so they can get promoted.

Her proposal, like Buracker's recommendation, called for a promotional standard involving several objective criteria, with the results weighted to rank promotion candidates by score.

"It gives the officers a goal to achieve," she said.

Contact Sonja Elmquist at 373-7090 or sonja.elmquist@news-record.com